Taking, sharing, and viewing selfies has become a daily habit for many — the car selfie, the cute outfit selfie, the travel selfie, the I-woke-up-like-this selfie. Apart from a social capacity, self-portraiture has long served as a means for self and identity exploration. For some, it’s about figuring out who they are. For others, it’s about projecting how they want to be perceived. Sometimes it’s both.

What's wow about the feature:

Photography in the form of a selfie is a very direct form of expression. It comes with a set of rules bounded by reality. Illustration, on the other hand, empowers people to define themselves - it’s warmer and less fraught than reality.

Google is introducing a feature in Allo that uses a combination of neural networks and the work of artists to turn your selfie into a personalized sticker pack. Simply snap a selfie, and it’ll return an automatically generated illustrated version of you, on the fly, with customization options to help you personalize the stickers even further.

To create an illustration of you that captures the qualities that would make it recognizable to your friends, Google team worked alongside an artistic team to create illustrations that represented a wide variety of features. Artists initially designed a set of hairstyles, for example, that they thought would be representative, and with the help of human raters, Google team used these hairstyles to train the network to match the right illustration to the right selfie.

If you are not happy with your cartoon, you can even personalize it further.

Availability of the feature on Allo:

This feature is starting to roll out in Allo today for Android and will come soon to Allo on iOS.

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About Praveen PenugondaHave interests in multiple aspects and write articles on Technology, Lifestyle and Finance. Tracking developments since the launch of Nokia 1100 and completion of Human Genome Project